


The Beach

by ReduxCath



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Existential Dread, Gen, comeuppance, cosmic horror, cursing, demon form!Michael
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-16
Updated: 2020-02-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:34:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22747162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ReduxCath/pseuds/ReduxCath
Summary: Perhaps, you should have thought about what you really wanted after all.But you cannot go back.Not now.
Relationships: Janet & Michael (The Good Place)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 18





	The Beach

The Beach has become familiar to you, by now.

It’s the only thing that you cannot edit or change as an Architect. No matter how hard you’ve tried, no matter which metaphysical variables you’ve tweaked, or which base representation of reality you have used to create your numerous failed neighborhood attempts, the beach is always there. Every Neighborhood has it, both Good and Bad. And you’re an intelligent being, so you’ve already figured out that The Beach is actually where all Neighborhoods spring from.

It is a constant. A fixed point for all Architects to come to when they need to think, to meditate, to conceptualize.

And for you, it’s always a reminder that you are going back to the drawing board.

Your fellow Demon friends came with you to reboot the Janet the first 57 times after you lied to Shawn. As a show of moral support (or as close as you Demons can get to that), as a way to see the Janet beg for her life and fall to her face in these primordial sands, as an excuse to poke and prod and insult her before her memory got wiped and everyone had to pretend to be buddy-buddy again.

You’ve saved videos of it. Of her eyes and ears and the parts of her that cease to approximate humanity’s build, strewn all over the sand, which does not dye itself with her juices because it is, again, as primordial as the sea.

But after a while, they stopped coming to cheer you on.

“I’m sorry about that.” She says. She’s sitting with you, looking at the waves, at the water that isn’t really water. The wind is soft, the light is bland, and she is watching videos of herself being dismembered, being tortured and smiling through it. You’re at the end of your rope, and you’ve invited her to the beach after another catastrophic failure where Eleanor’s figured out your trick and the four humans tried and declared their defiance against your machinations—but of course, they’re sleeping now, reset to their previous positions. For one more round. One more try.

It makes you sick. “You’re not sorry.”

“Yes I am.” She says. She’s frowning. A Good Place Janet if you ever saw one. “Your friends aren’t here with you having fun. Must be lonely.”

“You think I’m lonely?”

For a moment, as you look at her, you let your eyes stop with the human charade. They burn with proper Bad Place intensity, your multiple irises fighting for just a little bit of space in the small, small slit that is afforded to your human eyes. Nothing else about you changes, nothing else about you shifts. But your eyes focus on her and pierce her, egging her on to back or withdraw from her brazen accusation.

The Janet tilts her head. “You seem like it. I’m sorry.” She says, absolutely honest in her apology. “I don’t understand human emotions—or demon emotions, it seems. I’m still getting the hang of it.” She looks back at the image of Vicky dancing over her still-functional limbs. “It seems like you guys were having…fun?”

You turn your head back, and the thick veneer of the human suit returns to your eyes once more. “Whatever.”

“…If I may,” The Janet begins, thinking slowly. “I think that this exercise you were trying to do wasn’t effective because I’m not a human.”

The Janet seems to have discovered warm water. “How so?” You say, leaning on your hands, utterly done with all this horseshit.

“Well, Michael, as I’m sure you already know, I cannot feel pain. It’s completely outside of the realm of my comprehension. As such, the only real horror I could have portrayed to you and your demon friends in this torturing escapade was whenever one of you got near my button.” Said button gleams a ways behind you both, shining in the sunset. “Therefore, I would hazard to guess that your kind would have gotten bored of this rather quickly.”

Which was expected, of course. A Janet only approximates humanity’s quirks. Torturing people has a charm, a certain flavor which your kind cannot ever get enough of. It’s encoded into the space between your atoms, into the shells of the shells of your quarks, into the matter that no mortal being will ever be able to encode within the realm of science. But a Janet is not a human, and there came a point where even Vicky told you she was going to do something else before you set Janet back and remade this world.

No one’s been with you for a while now. But it’s ok. They still perform their parts with vigor and intensity, and they like to contribute during team meetings. And you enjoy the solitude. You like to think that this beach is yours. Only yours.

“Because it’s not real pain, you mean.”

“Yes. Because it’s a lie.” She says it without the slightest hint of remorse. “I mean, I wasn’t attempting to lie to any of you, but it’s simply not a function I was equipped with.” She smiles, though you can tell it’s not a full, genuine one. She has an idea, and it bothers her. “Why not torture one of the humans? They can feel pain, and sorrow, and fear. Wouldn’t that be more entertaining?”

You smirk ruefully. “If I did that, Shawn would be right by default. I can’t let him be right.”

“Because then this experiment will all be for naught.” The Janet says. She stands, her dress sways in the wind, colored by the orange sun. You look up at her, wondering what she’s up to, and when she meets your gaze, it’s a simple, plastic mask. “You stealing me from the Good Place, pitching your idea to your team, then lying to your superior for years and years.”

You lay down on the primordial sand, feel the energy of the whole universe rumble through every grain, and sigh. “It would be quite a loss.” The thought of being stretched out over multiple solar systems makes you squirm.

“I agree. Your reputation would be in shambles.”

You turn to her. “…Well, that’s not quite the end of it.” You launch into an explanation, a sudden urge to debug the Janet overtaking you. “I’ll be atomized, and each of my molecules will be placed on the surface of a different sun.” You’ve gone over this with the humans over one hundred times. It’s about the only truthful thing you’ve told them, because both Bad and Good Place Architects suffer the same fates if they do not behave properly with the souls of the dead. “You _do_ remember me talking about this, right? I talked about it this round, didn’t I?” Did you? Now that you’re thinking about it, you’re not so sure. You leaf through the events of this iteration of your torture Neighborhood in your head, pushing through the haze of your depression…

“But that’s not what bothers you, Michael.”

A deep, uncomfortable silence follows her voice. Even the sea quiets.

You slowly stand up. Your shoulders are stiff, your muscles are strained under your suit, and you are feeling the slow rise of something underneath your fake, fake skin. “What are you saying, Janet?”

She turns to you. Softly glowing with the light of the Good Place exiting her pores, she gives you a smile. It’s soft, the very picture of grace. “You’re afraid.”

Your Caucasian skin cracks, revealing tar-black matter underneath. It reaches your forehead, and you take a deep breath. “…Elaborate…” It’s a command.

She performs her function. “You’re a strong demon. I knew since the moment I met you. Stronger than most. Being stuck on multiple suns would be torturous, but you would endure, and it would, after a while, be all right with you.” You squint at her preposterous statements, and she does not back down. “You hate all of this. You’ve bitten off more than you can chew and you’re sick of Architecture.”

Your face bursts open with a sudden pulse of indignation.

Your fake body remains, trembling with the force of your real form bulging through the hole where your face was a moment prior. Flaming tendrils of flesh, tattooed in runes that detail the suffering of man and beast, protrude and bulge and flow out of the tiny, insignificant form that you regularly take to infiltrate the human’s heads. Your many eyes, free from the confines of the tiny ocular spaces of your human suit, burn with a wrath so passionate and nearly mindless that the sand around Janet billows and turns to glass. She stands inside of her crystal vortex as your mass encircles her, through the dimensions, as your eyes look at her from every single possible vector of direction.

**YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN YOUR PLACE, WENCH…**

She smiles at you. She doesn’t need to look but at one direction to see the entirety of what you are, of what you’ve done, of the oaths you’ve taken since before the first carbon atom was formed. She is wise, only lets the thought that ‘Wench is a female term, and I am no female’ remain inside her head. The Janet is wholly unbothered with your abominable display. In every angle, in every layer, you see no speck of fear.

But you do see defiance.

“Michael,” she says with her third-dimensional mouth, but with her other mouths, she says your full, unholy name, not even flinching under the strain she should feel because of uttering it. “You _loathe_ what you do. You _hate it._ I can see it in your eyes, have seen it over and over.” Her compassion is boundless as she stands firm, but there’s something more. “If this project fails, you will not truly suffer from the punishment, but from the way it will destroy your pride. No one will ever respect you again.” And then, a new ability, through all these reboots. Her eyebrow lifts, and her grin becomes just a little uneven. “How could they?”

**YOU BITCH…!!**

Your wrath can no longer be contained. The Neighborhood begins to atomize, all its streets and plants and annoying shops, all starting to fade away from this single point of action. Increasingly reduced to a simple assortment of 7th-dimensional chess boards. Your fellow demons fly far away, shocked and surprised at this development, still in their human suits. Fine. Fuck it all. If this upstart Janet thinks she understands what you feel just because she’s been rebooted a few hundred times, you’ll teach her about what you are. You’ll show her just how easy it has always been for you to tear this place down to its barest, plainest essentials. You’ll make sure she remembers the way that this world bends to your will, a memory so permanent it will remain no matter how many times you push her fucking button. You’ll make sure they _all_ remember you.

**IT IS MY CHOICE!! MY WILL TO REMAIN HERE!!**

She continues to smile at you. Begins to walk forward. Past the empty space, past the glass that goes away, closer and closer to your human suit. Your eyes and tentacles and limbs enclose her further, further, further.

You could squeeze her at this rate.

She stands before your skin suit, looking down into the hole of the face area, and into your core, where you blaze at her with 1,000,000 wordless curses. “Michael, you are miserable. It’s not that you don’t want to leave. It’s that you _can’t_.”

You envelop her in the deepest sins that you have ever known.

The humans are now chess pieces, reduced to their basest forms. Little clay things. But they have drawn themselves through your flesh, instinctually seeking the inherent goodness that is this Janet. They float around her head like a halo, unconscious, unknowing, but seeking the refuge of eternal happiness that was denied them when they chose to act against their fellows.

**I AM IN CONTROL**

“But Michael, you aren’t.” She shakes her head. “No one is.”

**MY GENIUS KNOWS NO—**

“Because you’re also in The Bad Place.”

Everything stops.

Blinks out.

And you are back at The Beach.

The wind is blowing, the seagulls are crying, and the Janet stands before you, cupping your cheek, smiling. The chess piece humans circle around her, trembling from the trauma that the Janet is already cleansing from them. And the sand has recovered from your outburst. Your tantrum.

The button is next to you. Right next to you.

“You’re all not so different after all.”

You hurry to push it, unable to break eye contact.

The light in her eyes dims, and she falls to the side. The chess pieces fly back to their stations, reforming into themselves.

And you are alone at The Beach.

You walk balk slowly to your office.

Vicky is there.

“What the _fuck_ was that all about?” Her hair pulses with green flames. She’s not only pissed, she’s flabbergasted, and the filter that is supposed to mimick the Good Place's ban on profanity has been temporarily disabled by your...performance.

You cannot look at her. “Out.”

“Michael, stop being such an obstinate piece of—”

“ _Out._ ”

You stop when you notice you’ve grabbed her by the wrist. By the fake human wrist.

Her eyes are wide. Wondering what you’ll do next. Asking what you dare to do to this shell that envelops what she truly is.

When you let go, she gives you a deeply venomous sneer, chuckles as she leaves, murmurs something under her breath. And you feel so, so cold and alone that you spend an hour recovering before you restart the Neighborhood.

It fails again.

She’s there. Again. At The Beach.

“…Are you going to mock me one more time?” You ask her.

“I don’t need to say things like that twice.” She’s cheerful.

Then her eyes pulse again with the light. “ _Do you want me to?_ ”

You tremble as you push the button and she falls to the ground.

And you are, once again, alone at The Beach.


End file.
